Silicon Valley is a place, not a company. There are many companies in it and there is some variation in culture and expectation. So let me talk through some general rules and then talk about how this applies to your stereotypical we’re-cool-and-hip tech company.

I've done lots of interviews, lots of interview coaching, and lots of interviewer training. People on all sides want to do a good job, but they often have a very silly idea of how to get there. They might also have silly ideas as to what actually constitutes a good job.

If you spend all your free time coding, you’re going to probably be miserable and burn out. Chasing this dream of yours by getting narrowly focused on one company and spending all your time on it will probably not lead to success there.

Of course Wharton manipulated factors to affect their rankings. All schools do.

Rankings are based off an equation that is more or less predictive of what we expect to see. Then, each school looks at these factors and tries to tweak the numbers as much as it can—offering some smaller classes to tweak the student/faculty ratio, etc.

The expectations and norms are generally to use a whiteboard for a technical interview. If you ask, some interviewers might happily let you use a paper and pen. Some will say okay, but not be happy about it. And some will flat out say no.

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In some fields, it's not looked at that negatively. For example, gaps aren't a big deal for software engineers, or across tech in general. That's because there is a shortage of good software engineers, so companies are more willing to look the other way on a little thing like this. They're also less rigid corporate environments, so they're more accepting of little quirks like this.

Your calling yourself “average” doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. One’s impression tends to be a reflection of self-confidence as well their peer group’s skills. Those who think that they’re average are sometimes great, and vice versa.

If you're truly average -- average intelligence, average coding skills, etc -- then your odds of passing Google's hiring process are pretty slim. Google's hiring process is designed to hire the very good programmers, not the average ones (and I believe it does so reasonably effectively).

You don’t put your whole career on one page. You put just the top one page’s worth on one page.

Reducing a resume to one page helps many candidates look stronger, not weaker. Recruiters are not impressed that you had enough content to make a three page resume (anyone can do that). Focusing on the best stuff gives a better impression, since recruiters can’t read everything.

Suppose Bob picks up your three-page resume and Mary gets your one-page resume. Both spend about twenty seconds skimming your resume, which is about how long it takes to skim one page’s worth. Who is left with a better impression of you? Mary. The average content that Mary read was better than the average content that Bob read. About two thirds of the stuff that Bob read wasn’t even good enough to fit on the one pager.